Beijing to Xining to Lhasa, the highest railroad in the world

Beinjing to Lanzhou. Observing the landscape from the window of the train. ALong the railroad, nothing is undisturbed. Every inch of land is manipulated and organized into little farms anf orchards with crooked rows of trees and zig-zagging roads, old stone bridges. The moutains are mostly bare, grimly terraced and harvested for stone or planted with lonely rows of grey trees. The towns in between and all along are the same colour as the naked mountains, clearly of the same material. They blend and dissolve into eachother, fertile valleys and light brown dusty homes below light brown dusty mountains. In a way it's beautiful, and I can imagine a century from now a few crumpled electrical towers and faded soda cans would be all the evidence of an ancient civilization.





Took ages to figure a way in to Tibet. Met people who just bought tickets and went and were turned away, my friend David disguised himself as a Monk and still didn't get in (he says, "I have crossed much more difficult borders than that"). One fellow did make it but had to stay low key and couldn't travel. So we had to do what everyone has to do, which is arrange a guide who will keep us from photographing the wrong things or feeling to much independance.

Eventually after asking everyone I met in Beijing, I was introduced to Bill, an ex-pat living in Xining who arranges tours for cheap into Tibet. I called him, and he didn't have a lot to offer a single traveler. I put the phone down, disappointed, when a tall Danish fellow approached me; "I overheard your conversation. My sister and I are interested in doing the same trip". And from there our group was born, and we later met David in Xining.

In Lhasa, there were many soldiers, young fresh faced soldiers with shotguns or assault rifles who would smile and say hello sometimes. There are many frustrated people too, like the young Tibetan man who punched a fresh faced soldier in the face when asked one too many times for his ID.










Xining to Lhasa. A treeless expanse, a flood plain etched with cracking dry river beds and wide crevaces, at times dotted with distant lines of sheep, but most often uninhabited, stretched flat to the foot of nearby mountains; ancient mountains, lined with time like an aged face, creased by water, season after season. Further on, flanking the landscape are snowy peaks, craggy and rough hewn. The sky is so blue.



Aside from the railway itself, and unlike the landscape from Beijing, this natural world is unmanipulated and mostly untouched. Even the train rounds the mountains rather than tunnel through.